It was an honest response to a simple question posted on a small corner of a website that receives billions of page views a month. Kaladin_Stormblessed—who goes by Lyndsey offline—could have easily expected the response to be ignored entirely.

But Sanderson is actually a big Reddit user, where he posts under the handle mistborn. And he noticed Lyndsey’s comment.

“This is doable,” Sanderson wrote in reply to Lyndsey’s comment. “Just PM me your real name and, if you want, a description of yourself. I'll put an avatar of you in the second book in the series.”

It was, as one redditor put it, like winning the “Reddit lottery.”

“When I first saw the reply I kind of gaped at the screen for a moment,” Lyndsey wrote in a message to The Daily Dot. “I was at work, so I couldn't do what I wanted to do, which was jump up and down and squeal like the fan-girl I am.”

Lyndsey said she had a very brief conversation with Sanderson in private on Reddit. She said he told her that, when the book comes out, she should “keep an eye out for someone with a name ‘similar’ to my own and that looked sort of like me.”

But he shot to prominence after he was selected to finish Robert Jordan’s blockbuster Wheel of Time series. Jordan wrote 11 books in the series before passing away from a rare blood disease in 2007; Jordan’s wife hand-selected Sanderson to finish the series.